d age pensions, national insurance, and workmen's
compensation do something towards mitigating the poverty of the poor.

But it must be confessed that we have made but little progress along the
main road of Socialism. Private ownership of capital and land flourishes
almost as vigorously as it did thirty years ago. Its grosser cruelties
have been checked, but the thing itself has barely been touched. Time
alone will show whether progress is to be along existing lines, whether
the power of the owners of capital over the wealth it helps to create
and over the lives of the workers whom it enslaves will gradually fade
away, as the power of our kings over the Government of our country has
faded, the form remaining when the substance has vanished, or whether
the community will at last consciously accept the teaching of Socialism,
setting itself definitely to put an end to large-scale private
capitalism, and undertaking itself the direct control of industry. The
intellectual outlook is bright; the principles of Socialism are already
accepted by a sensible proportion of the men and women in all classes
who take the trouble to think, and if we must admit that but little has
yet been done, we may well believe that in the fullness of time our
ideas will prevail. The present war is giving the old world a great
shake, and an era of precipitated reconstruction may ensue if the
opportunity be wisely handled.

* * * * *

The influence of the Fabian Society on political thought is already the
theme of doctoral theses by graduates, especially in American
universities, but it has not yet found much place in weightier
compilation. Indeed so far as I know the only serious attempts in this
country to describe its character and estimate its proportions is to be
found in an admirable little book by Mr. Ernest Barker of New College,
Oxford, entitled "Political Thought in England from Herbert Spencer to
the Present Day."[47] The author, dealing with the early Fabians, points
out that "Mill rather than Marx was their starting point," but he infers
from this that "they start along the line suggested by Mill with an
attack on rent as the 'unearned increment' of land," a curious
inaccuracy since our earliest contribution to the theory of Socialism,
Tract No. 7, "Capital and Land," was expressly directed to emphasising
the comparative unimportance of Land Nationalisation, and nothing in the
later work of the Society ha